Boss Quotes
Our crack team of middle-manager research monkeys have uncovered their favorite pearls of management wisdom delivered in quick & convenient 1 sentence sound bites. (psst... If you know of any good sayings we've missed, send us a note)
"By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day."
- Robert Frost
"The best time to start thinking about your retirement is before the boss does."
- Anonymous
"If you think your boss is stupid, remember: you wouldn't have a job if he was any smarter."
- John Gotti
"A good manager is a man who isn't worried about his own career but rather the careers of those who work for him."
- H. S. M. Burns
"The executive exists to make sensible exceptions to general rules."
- Elting E. Morison
"The secret of successful managing is to keep the five guys who hate you away from the four guys who haven't made up their minds."
- Casey Stengel
"Management by objective works - if you know the objectives. Ninety percent of the time you don't."
- Peter Drucker
"Kill my boss? Do I dare live out the American dream?"
- Homer Simpson
"Asking 'who ought to be the boss' is like asking 'who ought to be the tenor in the quartet?' Obviously, the man who can sing tenor."
- Henry Ford
"Don't blame the boss. He has enough problems."
- Donald Rumsfeld
"There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else."
- Sam Walton
"Show me a man who is a good loser and I'll show you a man who is playing golf with his boss."
- Jim Murray
"If you tell the boss you were late for work because you had a flat tire, the next morning you will have a flat tire."
- Cannon's Law
"The higher a monkey climbs, the more you see of his behind."
Gen. Joe Stillwell
"So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work."
- Peter Drucker
"The first myth of management is that it exists. The second myth of management is that success equals skill."
- Robert Heller
"Everyone rises to their level of incompetence."
- Dr. Lawrence Peter
"I've been promoted to middle management. I never thought I'd sink so low."
- Tim Gould
"The key to being a good manager is keeping the people who hate you away from those who are still undecided."
- Casey Stengal
"The only time some people work like a horse is when the boss rides them."
- Gabriel Heatter
"There is an enormous number of managers who have retired on the job."
- Peter Drucker
"To make a long story short, there's nothing like having a boss walk in."
- Doris Lilly
"Lots of folks confuse bad management with destiny."
- Kin Hubbard
"My boss did a boss job healing the boss’s itchy boss."
- Happy Worker (click here to learn what this means :))
To learn more about bossy behavior, check out our collection of boss surveys.
